The Jewel in the Crown

The Jewel in the Crown
By David Glenn Cox

According to the Wall Street pundits, a stock market correction is anytime that the market goes down 10%. Since October we’ve had two corrections and have started on a third. The Wall Street Journal reports that 8 billion dollars have fled from US stock investment portfolios. In finance all good things are bad things and all bad things are good things. The escaping capital has reduced the volatility of the market, like when the big winner leaves the poker game and takes all the money with them. So where are the safe harbors? What’s a billionaire to do?

If you had bought gold last September at $678 an ounce you would be rolling in worthless dollars today. Or if you had purchased commodities, wheat and corn are soaring on reduced supply and increased worldwide demand; the Chinese workers are no longer satisfied with a bowl of rice. Oil is up, you could invest in oil futures but oil is denominated in dollars and every time George W. Bush prints a new dollar bill the value of every other dollar bill goes down. Every time the value of that dollar bill goes down the value of that drop of oil goes up a commensurate amount.

The more that the price of oil goes up, the more the US economy in strangulated the more inflation is fueled which causes George W. Bush to print even more new dollars. The failing economy brings oil prices down but the inflated dollar pushes it back up again. Now add your food to that spinning dust devil, frozen pizza’s 2 for $7 dollars last month are now $4.99. English muffins from $3.29 to $3.79. A box of kids cereal? Forget it, I usually buy the cheap stuff, I’m a big kid but with an adult pocket book from $2.89 to now $3.19.

Save yourself from the video rental of Saw 4 you want a good scare? Go to the grocery store. The experts admit that real wages adjusted for inflation are falling the same experts that told you the sub prime crises wouldn’t bleed over into the economy as a whole. The same experts who tell us unemployment is at 5% and we will most certainly avoid a recession. Official government figures show new home construction is at 50% of 2 years ago but unemployment is at 5%? How does that work Mr. Wizard? Where did all those carpenters, plumbers and electricians go? I drive by hundreds of empty storefronts every day, where did they go to? Each Mom & Pop store was someone’s dream. Someone’s goal in life, someone’s school money, mortgage money and grocery money.

If you laid all the economists in the world end to end you couldn’t reach a conclusion. Higher commodity prices help the trade deficit; lower fuel consumption brings down oil prices. The Fed lowering interest rates helps to keep banks solvent but does little to keep Mom and Pop in their home. Mark Twain once wrote “A man who carries a cat home by the tail gets eight or nine times the knowledge of a man who just reads about it.” You can’t understand someone’s suffering by reading about it. You can solve the problem until you understand the suffering, abstract and collegiate dissertation’s on curing the illness without taking into account the suffering of the patient are unacceptable. After all cannibalism would solve both the high cost of food and the unemployment problem on an abstract level if you take the humanity out of it.

That one word humanity, is the jewel in the crown. In this administration however it is but an empty ugly gray socket on a glittering crown of greed. They know no humanity, they know only of profits and of judging the economy only by the success of their own portfolios. That’s why they want to stimulate the economy by giving the most to those who need it the least. Their self obsessed greed like the child who wants a present when its someone else’s birthday, they just can’t stand the idea of giving to those who need when there are so many who just want.

They will fight all the way down, as they fight now for the Bush tax cuts. A wildly expensive program that rivals the zeppelin Hindenberg in its failure and yet they want to build more. And we can afford it too, they maintain! If only we cut entitlements, if only more poor children do without lunch at school and a few million elderly who really don’t need those medicines anyway will do with out. Then we can afford to extend the Bush tax cuts, which have produced the worst record of job growth and the worst economic crises since Herbert Hoover. They have burned through the fat of the land and now want to start on the meat and bone, your meat and your bone.

But don’t you see? The collapse of the middle class makes the Bush tax cuts even more necessary. With fewer customers with money to spend they can’t make the same return on their investments, their stock portfolios are suffering as well. The price of a tank of gas in the new Hummer is noticeable and have you fueled up a private jet lately? Once that jet arrives in London or Paris the worthlessness of the dollars in their pockets become frighteningly apparent.

But those same foreigners are holding up the Real Estate market in Manhattan, Palm Beach, and Honolulu. The free trade ponzi scheme now includes selling off the marquee Real Estate that Americans can no longer afford and at fire sale prices. You see bad things are good things! Just like the outsourcing of American jobs was going to create more jobs the purchase of American luxury Real Estate properties should be viewed as an influx of foreign currency not the wealth of America going under the hammer. Without their badly needed Euro’s the American Real Estate market would be even worse shape than its current worst ever numbers.

That explains why this is a story at all, with out it the only story left to tell is of millions of people, ordinary people, little people thrown out into the street. The rotten consumers that this administration and media believe caused all this. If only they hadn’t purchased all those houses that they knew they couldn’t afford. Where on Earth did they get the idea that they could live beyond their means and spend more than they take in? The President thinks that these consumers need a financial education over and above what 7 years of the Bush administration have taught them.

Wrong way George has got it backwards again, the education is not needed by the lousy consumers but by the lousy leaders. The greedy bastards whose insatiable greed would steal food from the mouths of hungry children and heat from the elderly. Ignorant that you water the flowers at the bottom not at the top. That there are no flowers with out someone digging in the dirt. That the efforts of dirt and roots and stems produce the flowers not the other way around. That the Jesus they so love to praise would again topple over their tables and curse and condemn them for what they do. For he came not to save them but to save us from them.